Jennifer Bajorek, associate professor of comparative literature and visual studies, received an A.B. in English from Princeton University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in comparative literature from the University of California, Irvine. She teaches and writes on literature, philosophy, contemporary art, and photography.

Professor Bajorek’s courses explore topics and questions in the fields of literature, philosophy, contemporary art, and photography. Recent courses have asked what poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Claudia Rankine have to say to Marx, how stupidity gains currency in contemporary art, and why writers are so obsessed with photography. She welcomes Division II and Division III advising requests from students working in all fields of the humanities or in visual and cultural studies, as well as from practitioners whose work has a significant theoretical or historical research component.

Her research on literature and philosophy has included a book on Baudelaire, Marx, and Benjamin; essays and courses on French and Francophone lyric poetry; Caribbean and African literature and film; and Marxism and postcolonial theory, as well as several book-length translations of French philosophy. Her work on photography represents over a decade of research in West African collections with a geographic and geocultural focus on Senegal and Benin, as well as collaborations with photographers, museum professionals, and cultural heritage professionals to advance preservation in collections in multiple cities and countries in Africa (some of which can be found here: https://www.resolutionphoto.org/). Her research on contemporary art has taken the form of scholarly articles, exhibition reviews, and catalog essays. In addition, she was lead curator of C.A.O.S. (Contemporary Africa on Screen) at the South London Gallery. Her latest book, Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

She has received fellowships or grants from numerous foundations and institutions including the Mellon Foundation, the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange. She has also been a recipient of the Creative Capital/Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2013-2014).

She will be in residence at the Clark Art Institute as a research fellow in spring 2019, where she will be working on a new project on representations of migration.

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